“To me, an exhibition means to exclude. Some say that an exhibition is about selecting, about inclusion, but not for me. This principle has enabled me to reassemble the pieces of a history that is not a canonical one. In doing that, I’ve attempted to place our reading of the present into question, as well as our capacity to conceive what our present is made of...To account for the present is of course to rethink its genealogy.”[1]

Selected Exhibitions:‘The Philanstere Project’ was an ongoing series from 2003 to 2007[2] of site-specific proposals which critically apply Charles Fourier’s designs for self-contained communities to art collections.[3]

‘La Monnaie Vivante’ or ‘Living Currency’ was a series of 3-day traveling exhibitions conducted in Paris (2006), Leuven (2007), Tate Modern in London (2008), and at the Warsaw and Berlin Biennale (2010). Like much of Bal-Blanc’s work, ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ serves to illustrate the writings of Pierre Klossowski.[4] Taken from a book of the same name, ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ focuses on shifting paradoxes of perversion and industrialization, as evidenced by the outsourcing of living bodies in performance art.[5] ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ included a wide spectrum of works that incorporates living bodies, be it the artist, audience, or paid performer, from a multitude of practices and eras.[6] The selected works were organized in varying proximities to one another, and with widely differing distances between audience and work. ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ contained works by Santiago Sierra, Tania Bruguera, Sanja Ivekovic, Lygia Clark, and Simone Forti.[7]

‘The Death of the Audience’, staged at Secession (Vienna, 2010), collected the work of artists associated with Secession, active from 1960-1980. ‘The Death of the Audience’ attempted to locate a moment where notions of spectator and spectacle needed clear revision. ‘The Death of the Audience’ included work identified by Bal Blanc as “processes” and “art without work”. Again, here, Bal-Blanc centers his curatorial dialect upon Klossowski’s definitions of perversion and transgression.[8] ‘The Death of the Audience’ included works by such artists as Rasheed Araeen, Bernard Bazile, Robert Breer, Carla Tato, Eduardo Costa, Josef Dabernig, Anna Halprin, Lawrence Halprin, Sanja Ivekovic, Cornelius Cardew, Michel Journiac, Yves Klein, and Pierre Klossowski.[9]

‘Reversibility: A Theater of De-Creation’ is a stage play inspired by the destruction of David Lamelas’ Projection (The Screen Effect) (1967/2004), a work deemed by the authorities too dangerous to be left installed in an entranceway to CAC Bretigny, but impossibly to relocate without damage. ‘Reversibility’ is an ongoing project first performed at the Frieze Art Fair in 2008, and published by Mousse Publishing in 2013.[10]

Biography:Pierre Bal-Blanc is a French Curator and director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Bretigney, Paris. Bal-Blanc’s curatorial work mostly serves to “de-gentrify” the philosophical works of Pierre Klossowski (whose drawings he has also collected in ‘The Death of the Audience, 2010).[11] Kossowski, and by extension, the curatorial works of Bal-Blanc, focus on paradoxes of perversion and transgression, living and object, via industrialization and processes of production. Following his experience as a go-go dancer in the Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, Bal-Blanc organized ‘La Monnaie Vivante’, an illustration of the Kossowski book of the same name.[12] ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ serves to examine how the outsourced body, bet it participating audience member or paid performer, operates in contemporary art. Later exhibitions and published works, including ‘The Death of the Audience’ in 2010, further illustrate Klossowski’s writings, always striving to reconstitute the audience’s role as spectator, and what spectacle has come to mean in contemporary art.[13]

Employment:Since 2003, Bal-Blanc has served as the director of CAC Bretigney, the setting for almost all of his curatorial and printed work.[14] Since 2014, he has been listed on the curatorial team for Documenta 14, scheduled for 2017.[15]

Further Reading/Sources:Bal-Blanc, Pierre, “Give More Than You Take”. In Work, Work Work: A Reader on Art and Labour, New York, New York: Sternberg Press, 2010.

Lebovici, Elisabeth. "The Death of the Audience: A Conversation with Pierre Bal Blanc." E-flux. 2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-death-of-the-audience-a-conversation-with-pierre-bal-blanc/.

"Pierre Bal Blanc, Mathaf - Global Art Forum_5." Arab Museum of Modern Art. April 17, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hv1G2xsxqc.Major Contributions:Both ‘La Monnaie Vivante’ and ‘The Death of The Audience’, Bal-Blanc’s most conventional exhibitions, are informed textually by the relatively obscure works of Pierre Kossowsky. Bal-Blanc’s mission, it seems, is to elevate Klossowsky’s celebrity by using his writings in critiques and examinations of how bodies are utilized by artists, and how art is collected.[16] Divorced from the context of Kossowsky, Bal-Blanc’s work still lays bare the tides of exchange and the economic devices which drive delegated performance and art collection.[17]

WHAT ARE CURATOR CARDS?

These Curator Cards began in Maryland Institute College of Art's inaugural Curatorial Practice MFA as a project for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curatorial Practice (IACP) taught by Marcus Civin. This class focuses on revealing the history of curatorial practice by analyzing influential curators and exhibitions. The curator cards continue...

Together, a mix of students choose curators that spark their interest and create Curator Cards based on their research.

Please note that all of this information is strictly for educational purposes. If there are any additions, comments or concerns please contact us.